Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing.

Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.

But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...

> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.

I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.

The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care.

What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.

you'll win a Nobel prize in econ if you can prove "The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care"

I wouldn't judge this framework on a few year time horizon, but the time horizon to migrate to 100% EV fleet for Ontario.

The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.

This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".

Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.

If time of use had even a 10x premium, people in Ontario would simply switch to simple tiered pricing which is available as an alternative to time of use pricing. Each Ontario electricity company is required to show you which would be cheaper for you and allow you to switch to the cheaper tariff to obtain cost savings.

Got it, so then Ontario has good hardware and no incentives. Everywhere else has no hardware and no incentives. Still one step better for Ontario.

If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).

I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.

they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution.

it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable

It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care.

It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.

It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.

But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.

it depends on the capacity premium

for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)

the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.

but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.

in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)

and it varies regionally too

Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula.

People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.

time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety

For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.

It's probably worse for poor people, that already deal with the extra cognitive load on every other pricing...

But it's also probably best for poor people, that will optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.

Poor people don't use/waste electricity in large volumes because they are poor and don't have money to waste.

Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.

This is about moving usage around the clock, not cutting unnecessary usage.

Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in absolute values, but they have more relatively to their income.

If poor people don't have much to timeshift then it doesn't much benefit them. A single parent working 1.5 jobs and then juggling laundry hours may not be useful for that family nor for society. Maybe the first nnn kilowatt hours each month should be flat rate - like minimum wage sets a floor likewise exempt some small base of electricity usage from the pricing games.

My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.

What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??

My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh.

Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.

I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.

Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.

To be honest I wonder if those are good places for humans to live in, at all.

There's only a narrow band of land then where we would be able to live without expending large amounts of energy to stay warm or cool.

Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.

For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.

Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.

My gas usage is 1400 m3/year, corresponding to roughly 15 MWh/year. A condensing boiler would lower it to at most 10 MWh, even less for a heat pump. Add in the electricity, and that would still be roughly 1 MWh/month or a third of what the user above mentions.

It's rather hard to compare unless we know the spaces involved. My energy usage was significantly less when I was on the ground floor of a large apartment complex, using maybe 500kWh/mo at the highest. But I had less than half the space I do now, no private yard, no private garage. I couldn't install amateur radio antennas however I wish. I couldn't make changes to the unit however I wish. My family has grown and I now work from home significantly more than before.

I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.

Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.

It's 90-100F from 9AM to 9PM (and sometimes longer than that) with 100% humidity 3600sqft mutli story house. 2 adults, 2 kids at home. 2 electric vehicles.

Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.

What are are you using that much power for? I can’t think of much that uses that much per that you can shift to time of day pricing, perhaps pottery kilns?

Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.

Just having my 4x3090 constantly running deep learning experiments consumes 1MWh/month. And that's GPUs only.

Except constantly running can’t benefit from time of day pricing. Essentially it needs to be some 15kWh load that only needs to run for 6 hours per day.

If the price changes are large enough, you can just buy an extra board and have them at the best half of the time.

I think you would be better off buying a 2 Tesla power wall to load shift the demand vs 4x as much computer equipment that’s quickly outdated.

Bitcoin miners?

Your average constant electrical load is 4.2-5.5 kW? That seems excessive, are you running crypto miners or a small manufacturing operation/welding shop out of your home or something?

> My house uses around 3-4MW/mo.

This sounds.. astonishing. How can one consume so much in a house?

My average is around 500 kWh which results in a $200+ bill.

I thought mine was high at about 1.6 MWh per month!

It does sound high too if that's any consolation! My electricity usage is 1.3 MWh per year, though heating is then a separate energy bill.

Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.

>So I bought solar panels and batteries

...Mission accomplished?

Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.

Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.

I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.

"Profit"

it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful.

an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.

this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.

You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.

Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.

More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?

Yep that could certainly work if appliances and cars have an option to say "have my dishwasher finish or car charged by 9am tomorrow" and it knows how long a cycle takes and picks the best time.

For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.

The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore.

In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.

Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.

> Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high

teachable moment, all along you should have been using price

The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).

It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...